


bent crooked in the light around you

by coffeesomemore



Category: Pitch Perfect (2012)
Genre: F/F, beca figuring out how do feelings part two: pirate!AU, playing fast and loose with mythology potc-style
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-15
Updated: 2013-11-15
Packaged: 2018-01-01 16:07:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,903
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1045849
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/coffeesomemore/pseuds/coffeesomemore
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>pirate!AU: The Ballad of Dread Pirate Mitchell.</p><p>"On the very short list of things Captain Beca Mitchell believes to be impossible, encountering Chloe Beale at sea would be the first, second, and third entry, and she’d put it in last, too, just for emphasis."</p>
            </blockquote>





	bent crooked in the light around you

**Author's Note:**

> this was originally going to be a longer, much more tragic story (that was way more respectful of mythology) about wayward sailor Beca and the Selkie who loved her, but instead I listened to a bunch of love songs and wrote this, because pirates. [the list of said love songs can be heard here,](http://8tracks.com/robonyong/bent-crooked-in-the-light-around-you) if you wish to listen to it as well. title comes from "Thunder Clatter," by Wild Cub.
> 
> Unbeta'd, all mistakes mine.

They’re telling stories about her on land again.

 

Beca’s first thought is to blame it on Jesse. He exaggerates too much when he’s drunk, and if he keeps insisting on singing the twenty-verse song he wrote called “The Ballad of Dread Pirate Mitchell,” people are going to draw the wrong conclusion.

 

“It’s humanizing,” Jesse had said. “Everyone will see that you’re actually soft and vulnerable underneath that ruthless, gold-thirsty attitude, and they’ll love you.”

 

“Exactly. That is, in fact, the opposite impression I want to make. I want twenty verses on all the drinking skulls I keep, and my bed made entirely of treasure, and how charmingly my swash buckles. ”

 

“I’ll make you a pirate of the people!” Jesse had declared.

 

But Beca can’t blame the latest rumors on Jesse, because even he wouldn’t go for something like—“They’re saying that I don’t have a heart,” she says flatly.

 

“Yes.”

 

“And they mean—”

 

“Very literally.”

 

“As in—”

 

“You cut out your heart. In exchange for your ship.”

 

“That’s…” She flounders for an adequate word and settles, instead, for pulling an exaggerated scowl. “I don’t even _look_ like Turner.”

 

“Yes, Beca, I can see that with my eyes.”

 

Beca nods thoughtfully. “But I appreciate the sentiment behind it.”

 

“The citizens would be relieved to hear that.”

 

“Shut up and make ready to leave, pirate.”

 

Between being conflated with the actual devil pirate of the seven seas and Jesse’s rendition of a sailor who loved his lass more than he loved her country (so the Navy killed his lass and shanghaied him, and then he became a pirate out of revenge), Beca definitely prefers the former. It’s way more relatable. Way more badass.

 

\--

 

Sometimes, though, Beca remembers the very realness of her pulsing, living heart.

 

\--

 

The second time Beca sees it, she almost knocks Jesse overboard.

 

Not on purpose, of course, she would never, but she’s—surprised—shocked—her hand just _slips_ , all right, and Jesse, who shinnied up the mainmast to loosen corner of the sail, isn’t ready for the turn and almost loses his grip on the rope. After they get away from their pursuers, she apologizes by giving him her portion of rum and letting him lead their small crew through his favorite shanties. Jesse’s a good singer, but he has a romantic streak an ocean wide and a knowledge of maritime love songs to match, which makes Beca roll her eyes, but then again, she almost got him killed, so.

 

Because Jesse was busy _not dying_ when it happened, Beca’s pretty sure she’s the only one who saw it.

 

(the fire-kissed hair, the angle of the slender neck, the hard set of a pair of light eyes, an ongoing list of disparate parts that Beca, with her runaway heart thundering in her ears, only knows the sum of as—)

 

\--

 

For the record, the first time:

 

Beca waited until her cabin door swung shut before yelling, “Christ.”

 

Jesse stood by the desk, so agitated he couldn’t move except to run his hands repeatedly through his hair.

 

“Christ, God, Poseidon, _and_ Neptune,” Beca yelled, pacing around the room.

 

“Was that—”

 

“And Davy Jones and Calypso, too.”

 

“Did you—”

 

“Hell, and a few nymphs. All the nymphs. Blaspheme every nymph.”

 

“Did you see Chloe on that ship?”

 

Beca punched the wall so hard the floor shook. “Couldn’t have been.”

 

“That’s what I thought, but then you gave the order to cease fire and retreat,” Jesse pointed out.

 

“We were already hit, that’s irrelevant.”

 

“But you saw her, right?”

 

Beca slowed to a stop. Through the cabin’s full back windows, she could still see the spot of that ship on the horizon. “It was a siren,” she decided, because to think otherwise was—

 

Jesse let a long, deliberate silence pass before replying tightly, “Must have been, captain.”

 

“They can look like anyone from afar. Anyone it takes to lure sailors in.” There were so many holes in that logic one of them only had to breathe to sink it like an anchor. But to think otherwise was, for her, to hope for something impossible. On the very short list of things Captain Beca Mitchell believes to be impossible, encountering Chloe Beale—Chloe _Rogers_ , now—at sea would be the first, second, and third entry, and she’d put it in last, too, just for emphasis.

 

Jesse let another long silence pass. “I thought the Royal Navy killed all the sirens.”

 

“It’s the _navy_ ,” Beca spit, the same way she would spit _it’s my father_. “They don’t kill anything they think they can enslave.”

 

“Okay. Well, I’ll go see about patching up the hull, then.”

 

\--

 

(The first time, off the record:

 

It was as simple as the open collar of her ( _its_ ) ratty shirt catching in Beca’s vision.

 

Beca later wished she could remember the order that it happened, whether her hands were already faltering from nerves, from the eerie electric smell of a hurricane brewing on the horizon, from hunger. But time seemed to splinter around the memory. Beca was trying to land a shot and disable the other ship so she could slip away, or at the very least outmaneuver it. But then a figure bent over the rigging on the deck across the water caught her eye. Their shirt was too big, and it slipped lopsidedly. Beca could see the line of their collarbones, the angle and set of their shoulders, and her heart suddenly tightened, feeling too large for her body, and the wheel loosened in her grasp.

 

By then her own ship was off course, drawing level with them and leaving her vulnerable to the cannonball that tore through the upper hull.

 

If only Beca could remember whether she was already off course when she’d glimpsed it. If only Beca knew for certain that it wasn’t that sight that turned her ship into such an easy target, she would be a lot less angry at herself.

 

The cold, uncomfortable spike in her chest, though, that won’t go away, regardless.)

 

\--

 

The third time she knows better. Beca sees the fluttering red hair in the crow’s nest through her spyglass, collapses it harder than she needs to, and turns the ship in the opposite direction.

 

Jesse frowns. “If the possibility of seeing someone who vaguely looks like her is such a problem,” he starts to say. Jesse’s her best friend. He grew up with her and learned to sail with her. He’s the best (only) first mate she’s ever had, and she’ll always have his back in a fight—but sometimes Beca really wants to set him adrift in a rowboat.

 

“It’s a problem because we can’t fight it,” Beca says. “Or do you want to get torn apart alive?” The latest tales of her from land say that she buried her heart so she could live forever, and she really doesn’t want to dispel that notion.

 

“No, you’re right,” Jesse concedes quickly. His mouth turns up and down like he’s just thought of a joke and he’s trying not to laugh. Beca prepares to groan in response. He says, “Sirens also sing beautifully.”

 

“Ugh—wait, what?”

 

“I’m just saying, the similarity is striking.”

 

“I don’t think it’s a siren because it’s _symbolic_ , if that’s what you mean.” Beca fiddles with the spyglass. “That’s not even—I mean, I used to—I don’t think of her that way.”

 

“All right,” Jesse says with a smug smile she wants to slap off his face, “you don’t.”

 

She pokes him hard in the ribs and ignores his complaints about her creepy bony fingers.

 

\--

 

Jesse’s right. She can’t keep avoiding ships just because of some illusion. If the ship has a siren, it’s bound to have other dangerous creatures on it. She needs to know more. When the weather turns colder, she goes to find Amy, who migrates down from New England every fall.

 

“What pissed in your ocean, cap?” Amy asks. On deck, the newest crew members gawk at her, and she flips her tail fin flirtatiously at them.

 

“Have you heard any sirens around, lately?”

 

Amy tilts one hand back and forth. “There’s always a few around somewhere. Starting fights with the harpy bitches, you know, wars over hunting grounds and stuff. Why?”

 

“I think one is following me,” Beca says. It sounds stupid. It _is_ stupid, and Amy laughs uproariously.

 

“Cap, you’re a worm. Even if sirens had attention spans, one wouldn’t fixate on half-a-mouthful like you. No offense.”

 

“Nope, none taken. I’m okay with not being prey. Thanks, Amy.”

 

“If I hear a weird one with a taste for shrimpy humans, I’ll let you know.” Amy salutes her and pushes off from their meeting rock, jumping away like a dolphin. Her tail flashes iridescent in the sunlight.

 

“Show off,” Beca mutters. “Shut your mouth,” she snaps at the cabin boy when she gets back on deck.

 

\--

 

“What if it’s not anything?” Beca asks. She’s sitting in the dark corner of a tavern with Jesse, who convinced her to come ashore just this once because she needs the change. “What if it _is_ just someone who looks a lot like her?”

 

Jesse shrugs. “Then you hunt her down and destroy her,” he says, much more interested in finishing his beer.

 

It’s the standard solution, but the thought of it makes Beca uncomfortable. The resemblance is uncanny. It would feel too much like—

 

“It would _not_ be like actually killing Chloe,” Jesse says. “She’s an impostor and an insult to the real Chloe. Why am I trying to convince you? Aren’t you the great fearsome Dread Pirate Captain Mitchell? Who needs very little reason to cut a man-or-woman down, much less a reason so strong as ‘because you like her face too much’?”

 

“I hate you,” Beca mutters to her tankard, and she quickly takes a swig of beer.

 

“That’s more like it. I’ll get us more, you need it.”

 

Beca tracks his progress across the crowded tavern to the bar. A sudden commotion of people coming in through the door catches her attention. A specific shade of red hair saunters to the bar.

 

Her breath stops cold in her lungs. Her heart races. Her fingers shake.

 

It’s not so much the face. Beca can’t even see the face, though she’s sure at this stage it wouldn’t matter; all she’d see would be Chloe, because it’s in the walk, the confident shoulders thrown back and hips deliberately swaying and even the shift of her weight from one leg to the other.

 

There’s no way it’s just a strange coincidence, and no way it’s Chloe, who’s in Montego Bay and married to a Royal Navy commander and probably has a child, at this point. Maybe even two; it’s been about long enough. Beca looks to Jesse for confirmation, but he’s trying to return to their table without spilling any beer and he hasn’t noticed. When she looks back at the bar, the person has vanished. Beca scans the entire room, but doesn’t see any sign of her.

 

As soon as Jesse reaches her, she says, “We need to go see Cynthia Rose.”

 

\--

 

(The last time Beca saw that walk was in Chloe’s bedroom (conveniently located in the back corner of the Governor’s Mansion, with its windows right above a trellis), and Chloe had taken her hat and perched it on her own head, had sauntered around and said, teasingly, “The Dread Pirate Mitchell, huh? Bet they wouldn’t call you that—”

 

“Nobody calls me that.”

 

“—if they knew how much you liked to beg.” The low lanterns bathed Chloe in a soft glow. The room smelled like sex. Chloe was looking at her from under her hat, her smile sly, and Beca felt her heart slowly flip over.

 

Beca, still a little breathless, launched herself out of the bed and at her, kissing her hard and pressing forward until Chloe’s back hit the wall. She could taste herself on Chloe’s tongue, could _hear_ how wet Chloe was when she pulled away and pressed light kisses along her neck, over her collarbones, down between her breasts. The feathery touches made Chloe laugh. Giggles shook through her body while Beca sank to her knees, pulled one long leg over her shoulder and leaned forward with a hungry mouth, and she could have died for the sound Chloe made as she licked up and in.)

 

\--

 

Beca can’t show up to Cynthia Rose’s empty-handed, so they lurk around the swamp delta until a ship from the Royal Navy happens by. It’s been too long since her last battle, and Beca’s aching for a good fight. She personally cuts down half the crew, and takes the two highest ranking officers as prisoners.

 

“You have something on your…all over you face, there,” Jesse tells her.

 

Beca breathes heavily. She takes the wheel back and leans her forearms against it. “Yeah, I might have gotten carried away,” she says with a wild grin.

 

“I get it, you’re still a tough bloodthirsty pirate. You didn’t have to be so literal.”

 

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Beca has a lot of reasons to hate the Navy. Today she picks “her father” as the motive for her bloodlust, and sails into the delta. She takes the ship as far into the wetlands as she can, and continues on in a rowboat with Jesse and the prisoners.

 

Cynthia Rose’s swamp has a personality all its own. If it doesn’t want you in it, you get lost forever, and if you don’t have proper payment it doesn’t want you in it. The entire place smells of life and decay at the same time, crawling with plant matter and mutant animals. If you spend long enough in it, it devours you. Beca steers the boat carefully in the half-light, wary of the low-hanging branches and the muddy patches that could run her aground. When the small house on stilts emerges from the gloom, she breathes a sigh of relief.

 

Cynthia Rose comes out of the house before Beca and Jesse can wrangle the officers onto the soft ground. She tsks at the sight of their uniforms. “These idiots have been hanging around my delta for weeks,” she says. “Don’t.”

 

Beca has the decency to look confused. “I wasn’t going to say anything.”

 

“You sure? Not one word? Not even a really stupid joke about ‘my delta’?”

 

Beca scoffs. “No, of course not. That would be stupid.” Cynthia Rose crosses her arms and runs a skeptical eye over the men. “Hey, I even got one your size, I know you’ve been wanting a Navy jacket for…whatever you want anything for. Can I come in?”

 

“You know why they’ve been trying to get to me? Someone out there is telling a story about how you let a voodoo queen burn your heart as part of a curse you wanted to put on your nemesis.”

 

“A few things: one, I don’t have a nemesis; two, I don’t know where that story came from but I know it’s not from any of my crew; three, I’m sorry they think you’re a voodoo queen.”

 

“I don’t mess with that stuff,” Cynthia Rose emphasizes.

 

“I agree, that’s really disrespectful.”

 

“And I don’t see your apology stopping these assholes from harassing me.”

 

Beca sighs and rolls her eyes. “What’s the deal? You running a dice game in there?” Cynthia Rose shifts a little, and Beca yells out, “Hey, Stacie!”

 

“Is that Beca? Hey Beca!” Stacie calls back from a window. Two other voices call out to her, Denise and what sounds Lilly or a cat, and Beca smirks at Cynthia Rose.

 

“Fine, come in. But that filth can stay outside.” They leave Jesse to watch the officers.

 

One day, Beca thinks, she really needs to pay back all the favors she owes Cynthia Rose. She’s hidden away in the swamp numerous times, nursing wounds and repairing her ship and, a few times when she couldn’t shake off her pursuers, leading other ships far enough in for the swamp to take care of them for her. Plus, there was that time she slept with Stacie in Tortuga, after the near-disaster of Montego Bay. But that happened before Beca met Cynthia Rose.

 

(In fact, that was _how_ they met, because later that same night Beca got drunk and started a brawl that ended with a dagger in her shoulder, and Jesse didn’t know what to do so Stacie said to follow her, she knew a place, they’d have to take a boat but it wasn’t far and Beca would be safe.)

 

“I think something’s haunting me,” Beca says once they’ve settled into Cynthia Rose’s front room.

 

“Your nemesis?”

 

“I’m serious.”

 

“Did I not just say I don’t mess with that stuff?”

 

Beca puts her hands out in an attempt to calm her. “I know! I don’t want you to…commune with whatever it is. I just want to know _if_ I’m being haunted. I’ve been seeing things.”

 

“Like what?”

 

Beca squirms in her seat. “Chloe,” she says, eventually. “Mostly Chloe. Actually, exclusively Chloe, in places where she wouldn’t be.”

 

Cynthia Rose gives her an unamused look. “You think Chloe’s haunting you,” she says flatly.

 

“No, I think something’s haunting me and it’s making me see Chloe.”

 

“That’s not much of a distinction, in haunt terms. But, you did bring me a Navy officer with a jacket in my size, so I’ll take a look.” She finds a circular piece of class and hands it to Beca. “I need you to think of a memory of her.”

 

“What kind of memory?”

 

“A strong one. I’m sure you won’t have any trouble there.”

 

\--

 

A strong memory of Chloe:

 

The last morning after Beca climbed up the trellis and into her bedroom, Chloe woke her with a kiss on the cheek and the smell of coffee on her breath. “Pirates sleep so late,” she said, when Beca’s eyes fluttered open. “Or are you just a poor example of one?”

 

Beca stretched luxuriously, unused to such nice linens. “Pirates sleep whenever they want,” she said.

 

“That sounds fantastic. I’m sold, take me with you.”

 

“You want to brave the ocean with me and Jesse?”

 

“Two fearsome pirates like you? I’d be delighted.”

 

“My bed’s not half as nice as yours, though.”

 

“Oh, well then, forget it,” Chloe said airily. “I called down for breakfast, which means father will be in here soon to tell me how unladylike and irresponsible it is to sleep in til almost noon.”

 

“Just as well,” Beca drawled. “I need to leave, anyway. I can’t be the last one back on the ship. Bad form for a captain.”

 

“Is that what you say to all your bar wenches? ‘That was fun, now I must take to the sea’?”

 

“Of course not. I usually say ‘the sea calls to me and I must answer.’”

 

She caught Chloe’s hand before it hit her shoulder and pulled her in for a kiss. Chloe lingered over her, her mouth warm and heavy against Beca’s, her other hand coming up to cup her face. “I feel spoiled, seeing you three times in three months,” she murmured. “The Dread Pirate Mitchell, taking the time to visit me.”

 

“I wish Jesse had never thought of that name.”

 

“But you are now.” Chloe kissed her again lazily, her tongue stroking slowly along Beca’s lower lip.

 

“Not here,” Beca said. “Here, I’m Beca Mitchell, that bastard child of Commodore Neil Mitchell. A wharf rat and a shady character, but certainly no pirate.”

 

Chloe smiled, a little sad. “No one remembers that but me,” she said. “If you were still that,” she continued with a frown, “you wouldn’t have to climb up through my window. You could walk in through the front door, and my father would object but he wouldn’t have you arrested. And you could stay—”

 

“I wouldn’t,” Beca interrupted.

 

“I know,” Chloe said gently. “But that would be entirely your choice.”

 

Chloe looked at her with such understanding, and Beca’s heart swelled for her, this girl she’d known since childhood, who’d skip her lessons and escape to the docks just to see Beca, this woman with fire-kissed hair and eyes the color of the sea who looked at Beca _like that—_

 

The knock at the door startled both of them. Beca fumbled her way off and underneath the bed, while Chloe threw on her dressing gown.

 

“Chloe?”

 

“Yes?”

 

“Are you decent?”

 

“Yes, come in.”

 

Beca could see Governor Beale’s shoes in the doorway, but she was much more interested in Chloe’s bare feet on the other side of the bed. While he scolded Chloe for being so indolent when she was so soon going to be _married_ and expected to run a household of her own, she reached out and touched Chloe’s foot. Her ankle flexed, but Chloe answered her father with a clear and steady voice, so Beca fell to tracing the bones in that foot, the circles of her ankle bones.

 

As they transitioned into the plans for Chloe’s wedding (Aubrey was supposed to arrive in the afternoon to help; Beca rolled her eyes reflexively), Beca grew bolder, palming the curves of Chloe’s calves, as far as she could reach without rolling out from her hiding place, until Chloe nudged her away. Governor Beale left with the instruction to “be careful today, that pirate’s flag has been seen in the harbor. I asked Tom to escort you anywhere you need to go. He should be here soon.”

 

She counted to ten after the door shut, and then Chloe’s face appeared at ground level. “I’m going to kill you,” she said.

 

Beca wriggled out from under the bed. “Me?” She grabbed Chloe by the waist and turned them so she fell back onto the bed. Beca crawled up over her body, her fingers trailing along the skin exposed by the opening dressing gown. “But then you’d be arrested. For murdering a poor innocent civilian,” she said. “And you wouldn’t get to marry Commander Thomas.”

 

Chloe’s hands went to her legs, holding Beca in place as she rolled her hips up. “That would not be a tragedy and I would not regret it,” she said.

 

“But I’d be dead.”

 

“Shut up, please, and stop teasing.”

 

Chloe was looking at her like that again. Beca felt it slip out of her, as natural as it felt to stand on the deck at midday and feel the sun on her skin, “I love you.”

 

Beca had been in love with her for years, had known it since she was thirteen and Chloe had laced their fingers together and squeezed tight (because she wanted desperately to giggle but Beca had coaxed her into sneaking onto a ship that night and they couldn’t be discovered), but she’d never said it out loud.

 

Chloe pulled her down for a bruising kiss.

 

She was the last one to make it back to the ship; Commander Thomas spotted her on the road from the Governor’s Mansion and raised the alarm, so it was kind of a chase. Beca, with a hot, glorious fire in her heart, ran laughing to the docks, leapt onto an unmoored fishing boat with an exhilarating lightness in her body, swam to her ship and climbed up the side of it with an uncontrollable grin stretching her mouth.

 

“Well you look happy as a clam at high tide,” Jesse said when she clambered onboard. “We’re all ready to escape the Royal Navy once again if you are.”

 

Beca watched the bay recede from view, delirious with thoughts of Chloe.

 

\--

 

She opens her eyes to see Cynthia Rose leaning back in her chair, puffing away at her pipe. “Did you get anything?”

 

“Oh yeah, it was clear as soon as you started remembering. You looked like you wanted to finish that memory.”

 

“And?”

 

“You’re not being haunted. No spirits are trying to feed on your blackened soul.”

 

“So I am going insane.”

 

“Have you considered—”

 

“Yes, I have considered that it might just be someone who looks like her, but it’s not.” She stands and kicks her chair.

 

Cynthia Rose recoils. “You got a lot of anger stored in that tiny body, Mitchell. Don’t take it out on my stuff. Sorry I couldn’t help.”

 

“It’s not your fault,” Beca growls. She strides out of the house.

 

“Don’t ruin my jacket!”

 

She’s so full of want and regret she’s sick. She’d had enough of both that day she sailed into the bay only to be met with the full fleet of the Royal Navy. She’s sick from how inevitable it had felt, her only future in Montego Bay laid out before her, an unchanging tableau of a choice she didn’t get to make, of a chance in her life forever passed.

 

Restless frustration roiling beneath her skin, she clatters down the steps and run-walks the rest of the way to the prisoners. She would almost be embarrassed that Jesse’s here to see this tantrum, but in truth, Beca _really_ doesn’t care how it looks when she flies at the taller prisoner and knocks him to the ground, kicking at him hard so that he rolls away from her and into the swamp. He flails around for a few seconds until something deep in the swamp starts to churn, and then he sinks beneath the water’s choppy surface. An unearthly low sound bubbles up.

 

Tears pinprick behind her eyes. Beca hangs her head, blinks them away furiously, and takes a deep breath. “Leave him,” she tells Jesse, nodding at the other officer.

 

“Bad news?”

 

“No news. We’re going, come on.”

 

\--

 

Beca begins the new year by deliberately pushing the last four months out of her mind and focusing on pirating. Whatever Cynthia Rose did do, something worked. Neither Chloe nor her lookalike appear in the winter and spring while Beca carves a path from the Outer Banks of North Carolina down to the Spanish treasure ships docked in Florida, then around the islands to hide the treasure and distribute some among her allies.  The weather is mild and the breeze intermittently strong. She and Jesse dream up plans to go farther south and plunder the Portuguese trade route, maybe commandeer a bigger ship so they can do a turn in the Mediterranean and avoid hurricane season in the Caribbean altogether.

 

They come across another pirate ship under Captain Allen, outside Port-au-Prince, and Beca’s tempted to let him go in good faith until he opens fire. Her crew makes quick work of disabling it, forcing a quick, bloodless surrender.

 

Beca is checking the inventory on Allen’s sloop, taking specific note of the trade stamps on the cargo, when she hears a chain rattling farther inside the hold.

 

She follows the sound, her way partly illuminated by the holes she’d blown in the hull. “Identify yourself,” she calls out.

 

The rattling stops. Beca edges forward, her hand tight on her pistol.

 

Then, a dry, scratchy voice: “Beca?”

 

Her heart leaps into her mouth, beating rabbit-quick and shaking. She turns around a stack of barrels, and stops. Closes her eyes. Counts to ten. Opens them to the same view.

 

“Identify yourself,” she repeats. Her tongue stumbles over the words, her stomach clenches, and she wants, she needs to hear it—

 

“Beca,” Chloe rasps, “it’s me,” and Beca turns and runs.

 

She takes the steps two at a time up to the deck, feeling as though her body is moving too fast for her brain. Her crew clears out of her path until she reaches Jesse, who’s regaling their new prisoners with reasons why they should join Beca’s crew. “Number five, we have a very vocally gifted group, just really nice singing voices. Tedious things like rope repair and mending the sails go by—” he snaps his fingers, “—in an instant.”

 

“There’s cargo courtesy of the Dutch India Trading Company in the hold,” she interrupts him. “Put some men on it, now.”

 

“Are you okay?”

 

“I’m fine. There’s one prisoner in the brig, have her brought back to the ship, see that she’s given water and food and—and whatever else. Show her to my cabin when you’re done.”

 

“You look kind of…” Jesse does an exaggerated shudder.

 

“I’m fine.”

 

“You do seem pale,” Allen speaks up. A few of his crew snigger.

 

Beca turns on her heel and plunges her sword through his throat. “Anyone else want to ask how I’m doing?” she snarls.

 

Everyone holds still for a moment.

 

Then Jesse steps around her, calling for people to start moving cargo. Benji, the quartermaster, takes over guarding the prisoners.

 

Allen’s blood sprays all over her when she removes her sword. Beca wipes her face, walks quickly to the prow, where she’s hidden by the wreckage of the mainmast, and vomits over the side.

 

\--

 

“Are you all right?” is the first thing Chloe asks her when she finally reaches her cabin, bone-tired and smelling of blood and sick and kerosene. Jesse had convinced her to spare Allen’s crew, but Beca still insisted on setting his ship on fire.

 

“I’m fine,” Beca says. She wonders how Chloe can ask that when she can’t possibly look worse than Chloe herself. In the brig, she had some idea, but now in the bright lamp lights, Beca can see everything. Chloe’s been underfed. Her sallow skin stretches over the her bones, draw her jaw in a sharp line. Jesse’s spare clothes engulf her, and Beca wants to gather her up in her arms, to cover the damning shape of her collarbones and bony curve of her back and never let go, but Chloe looks too fragile to even be touched. A yellowing bruise smears over her left eye. There’s a half-healed cut across her cheek. “Did they do that?” Beca asks, gesturing to her own face.

 

“Allen was a privateer,” Chloe says dryly. “So, no, that was just collateral damage. He’d get no reward if he hurt me in any way.”

 

“There’s a reward out for you?”

 

“A finder’s fee. You know, if you need the money. Or if you’re seeking any favors with Royal Navy.”

 

Beca ignores the bite in her voice. “I—” She stifles a yawn. “I can take you wherever you want to go, but can we discuss it tomorrow? I’m not going to remember anything we talk about tonight.”

 

Chloe nods. Beca starts peeling off her clothes, her determination to get out of the day’s grime pushing down any awkwardness she feels.

 

“You can sleep in here,” she says. “I can, um. I can get someone to watch the door, and I’ll just take their hammock—”

 

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Chloe says.

 

“Oh, thank god.” Beca falls into her unmade bed with a groan. She feels Chloe crawl in next to her and settle, just inches from her body. Beca’s too exhausted to deal with any of this at all, but she listens to the sound of Chloe breathing beside her and an ache wells up in her heart. “Good night, Chloe.”

 

Chloe sighs. “Good night.” Her voice sounds far away.

 

\--

 

“So, not a siren,” Jesse confirms.

 

“No.”

 

“Not a haunt.”

 

“No.”

 

“Not even an evil twin.”

 

Beca shakes her head.

 

“Just Chloe, this time. Huh. Is it strange that I find that the strangest explanation?”

 

Beca makes a face. “I don’t get it, either.”

 

“I think it’s romantic,” Jesse says, ducking away from her fist.

 

“She ended up prisoner on Allen’s ship, I think you mean poorly planned.”

 

“Also poorly planned. But that could have happened to any of us.”

 

She’s about to retort when Chloe comes out of her cabin.

 

Chloe scans the deck, eyes squinting in the sunlight. She is still engulfed in Jesse’s clothes, but even then, even with all that’s happened, Beca’s mind stutters for an instant at the way Chloe smiles when she spots Beca.

 

“Yeah, not romantic at all,” Jesse mutters. He waves at Chloe, who waves back.

 

“Nope.” Beca had woken to Chloe pressed against her, forehead resting lightly against her shoulder. She’d lain stock-still for a full minute, willing herself not to press back, before rolling away.

 

She goes down to meet Chloe, anxious to have this conversation in private.

 

Chloe twists her mouth at her. “When I woke up, you weren’t—that sounds pathetic. When I woke up, I forgot where I was.”

 

Beca ushers her back inside and closes the door. “How are you feeling?” she asks. “I’m sorry we don’t have much besides hard tack and fish, but I’m sure there’s something fresh from yesterday.”

 

“I’m fine. It’ll just take time. I probably can’t keep down more than hard tack. And your cabin definitely beats being in the brig.”

 

Beca looks her over. When she thought it was some sinister copy of Chloe she was seeing, she’d been surprised, then angry, then angry that she was so affected by a fake. Now it just feels impossible. She has to make sure. “You look…real.” She glances away from Chloe’s unimpressed expression. “Was that you, last September? Right before that big storm near Florida.”

 

Chloe frowns, shakes her head. “Maybe. I sort of lost track of time, at the start. Probably. I remember a hurricane near Florida. I remember _you_.”

 

“I saw you. And again, in Mexico. And in that ratty bar in Antigua.”

 

Chloe makes a noncommittal gesture, like it’s _possible_ that it was her at all those places, and that’s more than enough.

 

Beca sighs in relief. “I thought I was going crazy.”

 

“I thought you were dead,” Chloe says conversationally. Beca stares at her, and she smiles tightly. “I didn’t hear from you for months, and Tom was getting excited about all the arrests they were making, so I thought that maybe someone had caught you. But I checked the prison records every day and you weren’t in them, so eventually I thought. Well, that.”

 

“I’m not dead.”

 

“I see that.” When Beca remains sullenly silent, Chloe continues, “Then the rumors started again. Dread Pirate Captain Mitchell, the pirate so charming the mermaids sing for her. The pirate so cunning she tricked Davy Jones out of his ship. The pirate so ruthless men came back from the dead just to tell her tale.”

 

“Okay, those rumors are obviously untrue, and also completely unsurprising.”

 

“The pirate who could never set foot on land because she gave her heart to a water nymph in exchange for a blessing from the sea.”

 

“That’s stupid, I’ve been _seen_ on land—”

 

“So I thought,” Chloe says, her tone still light. There’s an unfamiliar tension in her shoulders, an edge Beca doesn’t know how to read. “Well, at that point, I was missing you an alarming amount, and I was relieved that you weren’t actually dead, so I thought, if you couldn’t make it to land to see me, I’d come to you. You’re hard to track down, for how famous you are.”

 

“Well. You found me.”

 

“You found _me_. I follow you all over the ocean, and still you’re the one who finds me.” Chloe crosses her arms, a column of cold fury. “Where have you been?”

 

“You were following me, don’t you remember?”

 

“Beca.”

 

“I’m not doing this, Chloe.”

 

“Why not?” she demands.

 

“It’s in the past. It’s done, and I’m not—I can’t go back over it.”

 

“I’m not done, and I know you, you’ll never be done.”

 

“That’s irrelevant. This can’t happen.”

 

“Why _not_?”

 

“Because you’re Governor Beale’s daughter.”

 

“That doesn’t make any sense. That’s been true for years. It’s always true.” Chloe ducks her head until she’s on Beca’s level and moves closer until Beca looks at her. Beca swears her blue eyes steel, sharpen. When she speaks, her voice trembles. “You said you loved me and then _you left me in my bed_ , alone, and I never saw you again. So I want a full answer. Please.”

 

She takes the easy out. “I’m a pirate.”

 

Chloe laughs a broken hiccup of a laugh. “I already know that. I knew that.”

 

“No, I mean.” Beca runs her hands through her hair, wheels away from Chloe because she can’t stay this close to her without touching her and that won’t help. She starts pacing around the room. “I’m good at it. I’m good at sailing and plundering, not to mention murder and evading the law, and Chloe? I _love_ it. I love being on a ship. I’d rather die at sea than spend any significant part of my life on land. That’s even without the life of piracy, and I really love being a pirate.”

 

“I knew that!” Chloe says. “I didn’t care! You left all the time, that’s what you did, you returned to your ship and you came back, and then one day you stopped coming back.”

 

“We had to end at some point. The longer we went on, the less safe we were.”

 

“Oh that’s kind of you, to start worrying about our safety _then_.”

 

“I didn’t have a choice! After I—” Beca swallows hard, makes sure that she’s facing away from Chloe when she says it, “—After I told you I loved you, the next time I sailed into port your father was waiting at the docks with _Tom_ , and the full Navy in the harbor ready to arrest me. So I had to worry. There was no moving forward from there. They’ll always be waiting for me. You don’t care, Chloe, but the world isn’t just us! You _know_ what would have happened if I were ever seen in town again, especially around you. What would’ve happened to you. I couldn’t have you and keep this life, and you couldn’t have me and keep yours, and I think you already reached that conclusion so why don’t you just tell me what I was supposed to do?”

 

“You could’ve taken me with you.”

 

It’s an absolutely ludicrous idea that Beca has entertained too many times. She laughs cruel and hollow. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

 

“If you’d ever actually asked me, I would have said yes.”

 

“Don’t.”

 

“I’m serious.”

 

“You would have been saying yes to a different part of me. You don’t know me in this way. You may love me, but your life with me wouldn’t be like it was in your room. It’s not romantic. I could say I’d kill for you, but I’d kill for almost anything.”

 

“So would I.”

 

Beca stops moving. She lets the words hang in the air between them, scarcely able to look at Chloe with such hope, inspired by a declaration like _that_.

 

“I’m more than my father’s daughter,” Chloe says. “I’ve been trying to reach you since last July, and I’ve killed plenty. Never for you. Mostly for myself. It was a nice change from waiting for you—”

 

“I didn’t want you to wait for me,” Beca says quickly. The distinction is important, that she didn’t expect Chloe to wait.

 

“You don’t exactly get a say in that matter,” Chloe snaps.

 

“If Tom was that bad, that _boring_ , then you could have had anyone else. Everyone in Montego Bay loves you, Chloe. They always have. You didn’t have to…to take to the sea, to escape a future with him.”

 

“Don’t you think I know that? Don’t you think I tried to do anything but wait for you? Do you think I checked the prison records every day, unsure if it would be better to find you and know you were alive, or not see your name and hope you were free, because I was _bored_? I spent a full year, trying not to wait for you. It didn’t work. At the end of the year, you were all I wanted. No one else would’ve been good enough. Even now, when I’m so mad at you I could kill you, I want you. I’m reduced to a thing that wants Beca Mitchell.”

 

Beca doesn’t respond. She can’t, not while her heart beats so wild she can’t trust her tongue, can’t even complete a thought long enough to speak it.

 

Chloe sighs. “Let me join up with you. I can fight. I can sail. I can cook, some. There’s no going back. I’ll be a wanted criminal soon, and if not, I’d still choose this. At least let me be a part of your crew, if—if you won’t have me.”

 

The idea that Chloe would think Beca wouldn’t want her back, after a speech like that, after haunting her for almost a year—Beca’s across the cabin so fast she doesn’t remember moving. Her fingers tangle in Chloe’s fire-kissed hair, her other hand wraps around her waist and pulls them flush together, eye to eye, thigh to thigh. Chloe feels reassuringly real. “Of course I’ll have you,” Beca growls. “How could you—of _course_ I will.”

 

“Did you really give your heart to a water nymph for a blessing?”

 

She answers seriously, “No, I would never.”

 

“Good,” Chloe says with a fierce possessiveness that shivers through Beca, “It’s mine.”

 

Chloe kisses her, warm and soft and hungry, and Beca loves her like she loves the sea.

 

\--

 

“So what now?” Chloe asks. It’s a beautiful summer day in the Atlantic. The sky is a clear, unbroken blue, the breeze steady and fresh.

 

Beca spins the wheel. She fixes her eyes on the Portuguese ship on the horizon and grins. “We pillage, we plunder, we rifle, we loot.”

 

“Drink up, me hearties, yo ho!” Jesse yells up from the deck.

**Author's Note:**

> two lines I cribbed from other writers: "eye to eye, thigh to thigh" is from "Little Bit" by Lykke Li; "I am reduced to a thing that wants [Virginia]" is from a love letter to Virginia Woolf by Vita Sackville-West, a line I find intensely romantic.


End file.
